When writing copy for a product’s homepage, one mistake I see everyone doing is they keep talking about all the features that their product has. I see a lot of websites that keep listing down the different features and how it is better than the competition. I can go to 10 websites and at least 8 of them would have listed their features in it.

One great example that everyone talks about is how Apple sold the first iPod. When all it’s competitors were selling 2GB MP3 players, Apple was the first to sell “all your music in your pocket”. Instead of selling a 5GB player, they said “store more than 1000 songs”. That is the power of benefits vs features.

The problem with listing all the features is that your visitor/prospective user has to do all the hard work of understanding the product and how the features will help him. Your visitors don’t care about the features or technical specs or what patented technology you are using. He is interested in learning how your product is going to solve the problem he has. In other words, what benefits he is going to get from your product.

Steps to turn your features into benefits

There are very easy steps to convert your features into benefits. Let’s take the example of a video conferencing product that I saw in ProductHunt. I will walk you through the 3 step process to convert the features into benefits.

Step 1: List down all of your features.

These are the features that were listed on the site.

No downloads

50 person meetings

Dual screen shares

Custom domains

International dial-in

Meeting recording

Step 2: Add “so you can” suffix

Now add the words “so you can” at the end of the sentence and try to finish the sentence with a benefit for your user.

No downloads needed, so you can begin conversations immediately without waiting to download some software.

Conduct 50 person meetings, so you can invite all the team members in your call.

Dual screen shares, so two people can share at the same time, without waiting for one person to finish.

Custom domains, so you can get easily shareable links.

International dial-in, so you can take calls even if you are on the go.

Meeting recording, so you can go back to refer when you write your meeting notes.

This exercise has allowed you to truly understand what your features really mean to your customers.

Step 3: Make it emotional

Take each feature that your product does and ask yourself how it helps achieve your user’s desires or helps alleviates his fears.

Start your meetings on time without waiting for your attendees to download some software.

Invite your entire team without fear of missing out because of space.

Easily share two screens simultaneously and collaborate in real time.

Setup your own custom domains so that your meeting links look professional in front of your clients.

Are you traveling? Don’t reschedule. Instead, call our Free international dial-in numbers and join over the phone.

Unlimited recording allows you to remember every piece of conversation during the call.

See how with just a short 3 step process, we have converted our list of features into benefits that are easily understandable to your users. Reading each bullet point in this makes the user want to start signing up immediately.

Create benefits which are emotional

Always follow the process and complete all 3 steps listed above. The 3rd step is the most important one which evokes strong emotion in the reader. He might have had a bad experience before and if your product fixes it, this step will make sure that he signs up for your product.

Tip: To learn to use his own language to identify his fears, uncertainty and desires, check out my previoustwo articles.

Sometimes, you would be tempted to reuse the same points you uncovered in step 2. Here are some more examples of why understanding your user’s inner desires and fears are important.

Instead of

“The quickest way to burn all your fat.”, write “Slim down in few weeks, without feeling hungry”.
“Deliver your project by improving the efficiency”, write “Pull off a great project and look like a hero in front of your boss.”
“Easily change your website design without even paying for a developer”, write “Don’t get cheated by expensive developers when you can easily click and drag to change your website design”.

Remember, use benefits instead of features and hit your users at the emotional level.
Use these steps and remember the above rules when you write your next copy. That will ensure that you will convert more and sell more.

In yesterday’s article, I explained 6 different ideas to read your customer’s mind and use the language/words that they use. I missed one important source of your customers – your competitors. Where else can you find new customers, other than your competitors?

Your competitor’s websites are an important place to understand about the product you are building and how your prospects use the product. Checking out the landing page and seeing what kind of words that your competitors use is an important step in your copywriting process.

Here are 3 ways to use your competitor’s websites to write great copy.

Testimonials

Most SaaS products have testimonials from existing customers on the home page. Unfortunately, most of the testimonials don’t tell any story about how the product helped solve the customer’s most important pain point. But on some rare occassions they do tell a story – of how they were struggling before, and their life transformed after using the product.

Use testimonials as inspiration for your copy

In the above example, you can see how important the automation rules are an important feature of Convertkit. And the takeaway here is that all other competitors have very limited rules or its too overwhelming. If your product solves the same problem, but better than ConvertKit, use these exact words to drive home the point.

Social Media

If you don’t get enough good testimonials from the competitor’s websites, then you have to look at social media – especially twitter or linkedin. Do a search for the competitor’s name and see what people talk about. Check out the problems they tweet about and the praises too. This kind of research is very important even before you build the product, but will also prove to be useful when it comes to writing copy too.

If you take this tweet, it shows how a normal user became a designer overnight. This uses the hopes and dreams of your user to show a world where they can design things without anyone’s help. Me beind a non-designer, copy like this would really make me want to sign up.

Case Studies

Most products publish case studies on their blogs – on how their customers use their products. They are usually an interview with the customer with detailed questions and answers about how they used the product and what problems it solved.

Case Studies are much more detailed than a simple one line testimonial. They give you more information about how actual customers use the product than any kind of research you could do with mockups/prototypes. What were their struggles, fears and uncertainity they felt, how the competitor helped solve all those.

One great page I would use as an example here is HubSpot’s customers page. It has a short blurb as a testimonial from the customer, but each testimonial in that page has a link to a detailed case study. One example I just picked randomly has the following text.

[CRYO] now has seven stores across the UAE. It has also moved into the manufacture and sale of cryotherapy equipment and the supply of cryogenic gas, and it has inked deals with franchisees in the US, Australia, Argentina, Kuwait and Turkey.

“We wanted to pitch to our potential clients in a more targeted and data-driven way.”

…

“They either weren’t user-friendly enough or they didn’t have all the features we needed to produce truly integrated campaigns.”

This shows how a customer expanded to 7 stores in a country and soon had to deal with franchisees all over the world. This opened up the problem of “pitching to clients in a more targeted way”. Also the customer talks about how existing tools “weren’t user-friendly enough” or “didn’t have all the features”. These kinds of words and phrases are what needed to be used in your copy.

These kind of information is an important tool in your copy. Even if you look at 5 competitors websites and go through 3-4 case studies and in each case study, get at least 4-5 such phrases, then you easily collect a nice corpus of copy which reads your customer’s minds.

These are the three ways you can use your competitors to understand your customers and get great content for your copy. Do you have any more tricks? Leave them in the comments below.

The landing page for your product is the single most important page on your entire website and it is important that you communicate well on that page to connect with your customers. If you don’t speak your customer’s language, they are just going to close the tab and move on to the next page. Worse, they might have a totally different understanding of your brand or product and might never convert in the future.

Using the right language and words in the copy will make sure that you hit the right nerve when the customer reads it. It creates the kind of brand loyalty that Apple enjoys. But how would you know what your customers speak and expect? Here are 6 ideas to read your customer’s mind and write better copy.

Speak to your customers (duh!)

If you already have a few customers, talk to them. Ask them why they are using your product and how their life has become better because of you. More important, ask them how it was before your product. Ask them to explain in their own words the problems they faced and how you solved it. What problems does your product solve?

If possible ask if you can record the interview. If not, take copious notes. Make sure you note down whatever they say verbatim and not your understanding of their words. Never paraphrase.

Ask them how they searched for your product, more specifically what keywords they use in a search engine. This will help in using the right set of keywords in your landing page to improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Always ask for a testimonial. Try to get a few kinds of quotes from them. You can experiment with different quotes and see which converts better.

Don’t have Customers yet?

You don’t have customers yet? No problem. Go out and talk with your potential customers and leads. Try to listen to the choice of words they use. Sometimes, the way you as a creator/founder of the product might have a different viewpoint than the customer who is using it.

If you are building a consumer product/app, head out to a local coffee shop and interview people. Offer to buy them coffee in return for a 15-minute interview. Ask them about their current problem (related to the one your product is solving). Don’t pitch them or give them the solution yet. Remember, you are trying to understand your customer’s problems and the language they use. Don’t seed their mind with what you want to hear.

Meetups and Conferences

Another place to meet new people is to attend local meetups and conferences. Check out meetup.com to see what meetups happen in your city and attend them. Talk to the people there and talk with them. People attend meetups and conferences to network. Talk to them and ask about them and their problems. Ask how they are solving it today and how painful it is.

Facebook Groups

Check out if there is a Facebook group that has potential customers and people discussing the problems you are solving. See what topics that they are talking about and check how others respond to the posts in the comments section.

For example, let us say you are building a website to allow people to search for apartments/houses to rent. There are many groups on Facebook, split into cities which have rental information available. But one common complaint you would see is the spam on it. Anyone can post anything and there is very little moderation process. You will learn this only by reading each comment. Maybe your USP is the zero spam tolerance.

Another example: You want to start a website where people would resell movie/sporting event tickets. There are many Facebook groups which already do this and it is quite popular. But one fear users have with these groups are safety of their money. The buyer is sending money before seeing the ticket and there is no way to get back the money if the seller has cheated. Your service might talk about how you handle the money safely and securely. “You money will only be transferred after you verify your ticket is valid” is a much more powerful statement.

Reddit

There is this saying, “If it exists, there probably a subreddit for it”. Go check out Reddit if your specific niche has a subreddit. Most popular subreddits might have memes or jokes. But there are some serious subreddits, which has a pretty good discussion. If the post has the [serious] tag, especially in the AskReddit sub, the discussions are high quality.

Check for topics that are in your niche. See what people talk about and identify common patterns. Redditors are pretty polarizing and it is a good thing. You understand their problems much better.

Similarly, check other online discussion forums and groups too for such conversations.

Amazon Book Reviews

If you are selling a product/service/website which already has numerous books written about it, be prepared for a gold mine of customer’s words about the niche.

Goto Amazon and search for books about your product. Check out the reviews and start reading through each one of them. Take notes of repeating patterns and use this in your copy.

It is important to read 5-star as well as 1-star reviews. 5-Star reviews show which words made the most impact on the readers, whereas the 1-star reviews show which parts of the book are bad and you can avoid those in your product.

For example, you want to sell a baking course. Just search for all kinds of baking/cooking books and start reading the reviews. Checking this one review about a cooking book, you can see that this particular user is particular about “having very nutritious food, but at the same time do not sacrifice on flavor” and care about animals and against animal cruelty. Also, photography of the recipes is very important.

Conclusion

Using these various techniques you can easily understand what kind of words your customers use. All you have to do is just reuse the same words in your copy. It might feel like cheating, but it is just market research and explaining your product in using the words your customers understand.

By using their own words to describe the solution to their problems, they would feel like you are a mind reader and would convert more. It would also help create the most loyal fans for your product.

What other sources do you use to learn about your customer’s language?

I am Srinivasan Rangarajan, (AKA) cnu. I love talking about Technology, Startups, Product Design, Marketing and related stuff. I have helped many startups build and scale their SaaS products to millions of users. Currently I head the Engineering Team at Mad Street Den.